Theater: King Lear

The YiddishKing Lear, an 1892 melodrama starring Jacob Adleras a merchant of Vilnius who disinherits his virtuous youngest daughter and divides his empire between her two rotten sisters, was a longtime staple of the Yiddish theater. When the actor Louis Calhern was getting ready to star in the Shakespearean original on Broadway in 1950, a Jewish cab driver asked him what play he was doing. Calhern told him, and the driver looked at him skeptically and asked, “Do you think it will play in English?” The answer to that cabbie’s question—at least if one sees the riveting new Donmar Warehouse production of King Lear, starring the great Derek Jacobi, at BAM—would have to be a resounding “Hoo-ha! You betcha, mister!” Under the swift, incisive direction of Michael Grandage, Shakespeare’s darkest tragedy—with its tale of a vainglorious old man, lethally ungrateful children (so, nu?), double-dealing, adultery, murder, madness, and reconciliation—plays like a barn burner.

Grandage, whose remarkable tenure at the Donmar ends at the end of this year, has a gift for clarifying, and harnessing, the narrative drive beneath Shakespeare’s poetry, reminding us that Lear is a ripping yarn as well as a masterpiece. The story unfolds against Christopher Oram’s stark, white paint–spattered set, conjuring the terrifying blankness of an indifferent universe (as Herman Melville puts it in Moby-Dick, “It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me”) and putting the focus on the actions of its (black-clad) inhabitants. From the opening scene in which Jacobi as Lear fulminates against his beloved but impolitic Cordelia (Pippa Bennett-Warner) and coos over the empty flattery of his scheming elder daughters, Goneril (Gina McKee) and Regan (Justine Mitchell), handing them the keys to his kingdom, we feel the inevitability of the tragedy that has been set in motion. The production moves like a freight train toward its horrible destination.

McKee and Mitchell’s ripe turns as the no-goodnik sisters—they luxuriate in malevolence with a gusto that borders on the sexual—are among the treats of this Lear. Other standouts include Ron Cook, whose Fool is surprisingly funny (I’ve never gotten much of a chuckle from all those puns prefaced by “Prithee, nuncle”) and movingly sympathetic to his master. And Paul Jesson makes Gloucester’s family tragedy almost as wrenching as Lear’s (watch out for splattering eyeballs). But it is Jacobi, of course, who makes this a Lear to remember. His meticulously calibrated performance embodies Goneril’s observation that “Old fools are babes again.” He charts Lear’s descent from once-mighty monarch raging against the dying of the light to wise-ass adolescent, whining child, and wailing infant with brutal precision and masterful abandon. He occasionally lays it on a bit thick, but why quibble? When he recognizes himself—and the human condition—in a naked lunatic (“Is man no more than this?”), weeps over the body of Cordelia, or, in the famous storm scene, stands in a shaft of light and intones, “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks” in a ghostly whisper, the effect is shattering. You were expecting maybe a picnic?